by David Steven | Jun 19, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence
Atul Gawande:
Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combated our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.
It should be no wonder that you have not mastered the understanding of them all. No one ever will. That’s why we as doctors and scientists have become ever more finely specialized. If I can’t handle 13,600 diagnoses, well, maybe there are fifty that I can handle—or just one that I might focus on in my research. The result, however, is that we find ourselves to be specialists, worried almost exclusively about our particular niche, and not the larger question of whether we as a group are making the whole system of care better for people.
Via Ezra Klein.
by Alex Evans | Jun 18, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global Dashboard, Influence and networks
Halfway between Copenhagen and Cancun, international climate policy seems to have reached an inflection point – on both policy approach, and narrative framing. Alas, as discussions I’ve taken part in over the last week at both Ditchley and IPPR seem to confirm, the political momentum is all the wrong way, on both counts.
Copenhagen produced a pledge-and-review deal based on a tacit low-ambition consensus between the US and the BASIC countries. Looking ahead to Cancun, all the talk is of sectoral packages for renewables, energy efficiency, avoided deforestation and adaptation – but not binding targets. At Ditchley, I even heard one of the main architects of the Kyoto Protocol saying that voluntary targets and national policies and measures were the way to go, for everyone other than the EU.
There was more of this line of thinking at the IPPR seminar I spoke at yesterday, where one of the other presenters was Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute – one of the main cheerleaders for the technology-led bottom-up approach and, conversely, a key critic of cap-and-trade or indeed the whole idea of carbon pricing.
When, he asked, has that kind of approach ever been a spur for innovation in the past? On the contrary, the key, he says, is to “drive down the price of clean energy technologies with large-scale public investments in research, development, demonstration and deployment”. Kind of like the Apollo program.
But he doesn’t stop there. More fundamentally, Shellenberger says, we’ve had the whole framing wrong. As he argues in his (excellent) book with Ted Nordhaus, he wants “a new politics for a new century – focus on aspirations, not complaints, human possibility, not limits”. So enough with all the doom and gloom. Focus on the possibilities! The new jobs! The gadgets! Green new deal! All must win prizes!
Well, I hate to be the party-pooper, but – seriously? Are we all really drinking this Kool-aid?
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Jun 18, 2010 | UK
Over at Guido Fawkes…
Word reaches Guido that a certain new MP is ruffling a few old guard feathers with his arrogance and brutal determination to climb the ladder. Despite barely having an office and working phone Penrith’s Rory Stewart, the Conservative’s self-proclaimed bright star and Afghan rambler, is lobbying his colleagues hard for a spot on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
Though he failed to mention the time he spent as a Labour Party member, he has bullet pointed his “career highlights” in a letter that has been snorted at by some old timers. “It’s highly unusual for a freshman MP to be seeking a spot on such a powerful committee. But then again, Rory Stewart is a highly unusual little man” one told Guido after lunch…
Right, perish the thought that an FAC member should be selected on the basis of actually knowing something about foreign policy. Of course it should be time spent on the backbenches, rather than in Iraq or Afghanistan, that qualifies you.
by Richard Gowan | Jun 17, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system, North America
The G8 is, analysts concur, in trouble. Since the G20 shot to prominence during the financial crisis, the 8 have always looked, er, 12 members short of full credibility.
Next week, Canada hosts the G8 in Muskoka before the G20 meets in Toronto. I’m struck by the logo for the Muskoka meeting, which seems to depict a tree being blown about in a storm and losing leaves. This is doubtless meant to represent the fact that rural Muskoka is a dendrologist’s paradise. But what an apt image for the G8!
UPDATE: I note that one Muskokan (?) blogger came up with this alternative image for the conference, featuring Barack, Hillary and… a symbol of Canadian power!
by Alex Evans | Jun 17, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
This year’s OECD / FAO agricutural outlook, which looks ahead over the period from 2010 to 2019 (news release; summary), didn’t get terribly extensive coverage in the media – unsurprisingly, given that its key message (“real commodity prices to remain below recent peaks but well above recent decades”) is exactly the same as it was in last year’s report.
But as soon as you start to delve into the quant projections, you see that there’s actually a big difference between this year’s and last year’s report – and not an encouraging one.
Last year, the 2009 to 2018 outlook (summary) projected that over the decade ahead, “average crop prices are projected to be 10-20% higher in real terms relative to 1997-2006, while for vegetable oils real prices are expected to be more than 30% higher”.
This year? “Average wheat and coarse grain prices are projecte to be nearly 15-40% higher, while for vegetable oils real prices are expected to be more than 40% higher”. Most media coverage didn’t pick up on this (though the FT, as usual, did).
That’s a big deterioration of the outlook in just twelve months. So what explains it? I can’t immediatelymake out the reason, so I’ve emailed FAO’s press office to see if we can get some more detail for them. But as I noted in The Feeding of the Nine Billion (pdf), the OECD / FAO outlook is in some ways unduly optimistic – as in the past it has “largely overlooked the potential impact of long-term resource scarcity trends, notably climate change, energy security and falling water availability”.
